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Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

#51

Post by Uehreka »

For me it's a combination of active and passive modes:

By active I mean actually coding. I usually have a side project or two that I'm working on (although sometimes barely at all) and I try to pick projects that involve working with a tool, platform or skillset I haven't tried yet. That's how I've gotten into things like deep learning, computer vision and 3D graphics that I wouldn't normally get to use at work.

By passive I generally mean podcasts. As a front end developer, I recommend Shop Talk Show, DevChat.tv's podcasts, Toolsday and Codepen Radio (and for people who are new to CS entirely, Base.cs is an awesome podcast). I'll put one of these on while driving or playing a zone-outable video game and just absorb.

I suppose I should also recommend things like Pluralsight and Lynda.com for getting an introduction to a topic I'm completely unfamiliar with. These are invaluable, but only if combined with actual experience in the thing you are learning. If I take a course on there and don't apply it soon after, I'll generally forget most of what I learned.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

#52

Post by pnathan »

I jump into a new language, a new technology, and immerse myself in it. Ask Qs on SO, read books, but write code. This is how I taught myself how to code when I was a teen, and it's been very effective ever since, as I have moved from teen to undergrad to grad student to professional. Solo self-education via practice, supplemented by voracious reading.

I would quantify a key difference between an effective intern and an ineffective intern as "has this person written 10KLoC". Writing software is a craft, and crafts require practice.

After initial competence is achieved, i.e., you can do your first coding language/tech and be comfortable, you need to choose another, different, one and repeat the process. It will break individual understandings of that one system and show you commonalities. Then, do it again. Even more different. Rinse, repeat. The breakthrough and toughness are required for getting better.

At a certain point, the problem of "learning how to code" or "getting better at coding" disappears and you need to understand how to work with others and building work products for them - open source or otherwise. On and on it goes.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

#53

Post by [deleted] »

ybalkind wrote: post #42
pen2l wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I "read" about programming for something like 15 years (books, blogs, HN, proggit, irc chat) I started actually coding seriously and properly the past 1-2 years. Easily learned a hundred-fold more by doing it, literally. I think too often I told myself I'm "not good enough to make something serious". And you know -- it was probably true. But that doesn't matter . Just start, things will fall into place, somet…

Do you mind sharing your age? Also, what programming language/s do you code in and what level have you reached? Finally, how did you actually start coding?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #33
pen2l wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I "read" about programming for something like 15 years (books, blogs, HN, proggit, irc chat) I started actually coding seriously and properly the past 1-2 years. Easily learned a hundred-fold more by doing it, literally. I think too often I told myself I'm "not good enough to make something serious". And you know -- it was probably true. But that doesn't matter . Just start, things will fall into place, somet…

> I think too often I told myself I'm "not good enough to make something serious". And you know -- it was probably true. But that doesn't matter. Just start, things will fall into place, sometimes you'll fail, sometimes you won't. It's just the only way really. it's not true, most "serious" things aren't that difficult or complex

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

#57

Post by DonaldFisk »

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

- Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

#58

Post by thijsvandien »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #57

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." - Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"

The exact same thing can be said about many other subjects, even not related to IT at all. As an example, inspiration for simulated annealing, an ML technique, comes from welding.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

#59

Post by lowleveldesign »

Contributing to an open source projects is a great way of learning too. It forces you to read and understand the project’s code and concepts behind it. Then you practice coding by implementing your new feature. You also need to test it thoroughly. Finally, you will get a code review for your code.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

#60

Post by cdevs »

darepublic wrote: post #37
SatvikBeri wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found this too - I work much better when I know someone I respect will read my code.

Yes. Being able to give an opinion about code or code design and back it up with reasoned arguments (as opposed to dogmatic obedience) is part of becoming a good dev imo

Agree, I think code review also helps yank out that laziness in that code that we thought we didn't have time to make more readable. Send the code back and make them push their code to a better level before putting it live. I've noticed UX problems in code reviews from people who should know better, we just get lazy and think "working" is good enough.
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